Six degrees of Jason Bay

By now, you're probably familiar with Jason Bay's history with the Mets and Omar Minaya.

It was Minaya, then as GM of the Montreal Expos, who traded a 23-year-old Bay to the Mets in March 2002 along with Jimmy Serrano for a prospect named Lou Collier. Four months later, the Mets, still in the Steve Phillips era, traded Bay and two other players to the Padres for Jason Middlebrook and Steve Reed.

But Bay has some other connections to Mets players past and present that you may not know about (and maybe don't care about, but I had some time to kill waiting for a flight home from Florida tonight, so here is some Bay trivia).

In his first two years in the minors, with the Vermont Expos in 2000 and the Jupiter Hammerheads in 2001, Bay was a teammate of Wilson Valdez, one of many forgettable players from the Mets' 2009 nightmare.

During a stint with Class-A St. Lucie in 2002, Bay played with Jose Reyes on a team that also included Angel Pagan and Mike Jacobs. His manager in St. Lucie was Ken Oberkfell, who now manages the Mets' Triple-A affiliate in Buffalo.

Bay also played with Reyes at Double-A Binghamton later that year. Also on the B-Mets that year: Aaron Heilman, Heath Bell and Joe McEwing.

In 2003, in the Padres farm system, Bay played for the Triple-A Portland Beavers. Among his teammates was a young left-hander named Oliver Perez, whom the Padres traded along with Bay to Pittsburgh in August 2003. The two played together until the Pirates traded Perez to the Mets in 2006.

Two days after making his major-league debut with the Padres in 2003, Bay was hit by a pitch that broke his right wrist. The pitcher? Elmer Dessens, who was then with the D-Backs and is now a Mets reliever.

Bay also played with Nelson Figueroa in Pittsburgh in 2003 and 2004. In 2008, Bay and Alex Cora were teammates in Boston. And lastly, in 2009, Bay played with Mets prospect Shawn Bowman for Team Canada in the World Baseball Classic.

That's all the useless information I've got for now. I'll have more from Citi Field on Tuesday after Bay's introductory presser, which is slated to begin at 11 a.m.